- I used the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator to see what age I'm predicted to live until.
- It said I would live to age 96, but could live even longer with some lifestyle adjustments.
- Experts say many genetic and environmental factors influence how fast or slow we age.
Dr. Thomas Perls, who created the free "Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator" says people often complain to him that "we don't know yet how to get people to these very old ages in good health" — but his decades of research on centenarians don't support that idea.
"We do, we absolutely do," he said.
America's terrible life expectancy rate may leave you with the impression that it's hard to make it past your 70s in the US. But in reality, our low life expectancy projections are more indicative of the fact that it's hard for younger Americans to get old in the first place. That's due to a unique and devastating mix of US social issues, with fatalities related to drugs, poor diets, and guns all playing an outsized role.
Some of the variables that factor into a long life are more controllable than others. And, a lot of what determines who lives to 100 is genetic. But the more malleable pillars of healthy aging include diet, lifestyle habits like smoking or sunscreen use, relationships, and stress management.
So Perls has developed a 10 minute, 40 prompt questionnaire aimed at helping people calculate how on track their own health habits really are for maximizing longevity. I decided to put it to the test, being brutally honest about my own health habits, to see how long I might live.
The calculator said I would live until my mid-90s
When I filled out the calculator at LivingTo100.com, the Q&A flew by. It took me about 10 minutes from start to finish, and it only required finding my latest cholesterol and blood pressure readings first.
Questions included prompts about how you deal with stress, inquiries about your weekly habits, including whether you see family or friends "who are practically like family" at least three times a week, and nitty gritty nutritional and medical details, including how often you eat red meat, chips, or cake, and how many times a week you exercise.
From a healthy aging perspective, the questions made sense. I knew from previous reporting that good relationships, stress management, daily exercise, and sleep are all critical for longevity.
But when it came to the diet questions on screen, the level of granularity left me feeling a little sheepish. How often do I really eat sweets like candy bars or pastries: 1-2 days per week or is it more like 3-5? Do I snack more often on veggies or on chips? And what's my weekly intake of white bread, french fries, and other sugary, white carbs? We know those are nutritionally inferior to the cholesterol-controlling, nutrient-rich whole grains which have long been associated with longer lifespans, and lower rates of heart disease. I was starting to worry about how much the bagel I had for breakfast was going to ding my score.
Finally, there it was. The hard number telling me my life expectancy: 96!
Soon, my whole family wanted to take it — and the results were surprising
Honestly, living until 96 is a bit of a daunting prospect, given that I haven't even reached my 40s yet. It was definitely older than I might've guessed. I immediately texted my family a link to the tool. "Just tried this," was all I said, but before the day was over, everybody had completed it.
I suspect my family is not unique in this regard — don't we all want to know how long we might live? The idea of having a little more certainty about the boundaries of this one life, to know how long we could stick around, is at once terrifying and comforting.
Surprisingly, my death estimate was about 10 years higher than the number my Ironman brother got — but it was about 10 years lower than my mother's life expectancy, which was 105. The wide variability among us was a nice reminder that this is really just a teaching tool, meant to provide general information about healthy behaviors. It's not a precision medical device.
"Stop with the white bread!" the calculator seemed to scream at me
After revealing my death prediction, the website asked if I wanted to see some recommendations to improve my lifespan. Sure, I thought, why not go for 100?
I was a little surprised when the website suggested that the number one thing I could do to improve my longevity, cracking the century mark, would be to improve my diet. While other recommended lifestyle tweaks like flossing more, or being more judicious about sun exposure could tack on an extra year of life, at most, diet changes could result in another half decade for me, the calculator said:
"With your current consumption, removing fast foods from your diet could add 4 years to your life expectancy." And, "Cutting back sweets in your diet to one to two times per week or less could add a year."
There was also a line in there about popping a daily aspirin to improve lifespan, but research on that idea has been so back and forth over the past several years, I kind of ignored it.
As a science and health reporter, I've long been keeping tabs on studies and evidence-based guidelines around nutrition, and I understand well how unprocessed diets of wholesome foods like fibrous vegetables, whole grains, and beans are so often inextricably connected to some of the best lifespans. I consider myself a relatively healthy eater — not a health nut by any means — but a conscious consumer who prefers snacking on nuts or plain yogurt, and almost never drinks sugary sodas or sweet juices. So it was a bit alarming, at first, to hear that cutting back on the bagels (tear) and a little less candy (OK, fine) could help improve my longevity most.
This does line up with what we know about the longest-lived people in the world. They thrive in places where daily movement and healthy diet habits are built into the environment, without drive-thrus or packaged snacks offered on every corner.
"We might have a sense that healthy living is free — but it's not actually free and it certainly isn't easy," Columbia University longevity researcher Daniel Belsky said to me recently. That's why he thinks trying to change the environments people live in, rather than focusing on individual behavior change, would be a more lasting and equitable recipe for better longevity.